


Disintegration

by Beldam



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-08
Updated: 2016-08-08
Packaged: 2018-08-07 08:28:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7707970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beldam/pseuds/Beldam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bit by bit, Reaper comes apart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Disintegration

Gabriel’s body has been strange since the accident. In all honesty, everything has been strange—wrong. Since the explosion, and before. Nothing sits right with him anymore, nothing feels right. But his body bears the brunt of it.

He finds himself moving through rooms in plumes of smoke—he barrels through doorways as if buildings have coughed him out, narrow lanes of soot dusting the ground like ant tracks in his wake. With a bit of experimentation, he realizes he doesn’t really need a fully functional body anymore, so when he’s not gasping fumes along the rafters like a wraith, he just makes a familiar case for himself to move in, a skinsuit completely hollowed of organs and bones, not quite human but human _enough_. He's grateful he can even do that. It feels like there's some sort of molecular inertia that guides him into his current form. It hurts anyway (it all hurts) but his body mostly remembers itself, can still recall the breadth, the height, the straight posture, the long stride–maybe remembers itself too well, because his face is all wrong, maimed and burnt because that’s how it looked right before he died–and it fights back against him whenever he tries to modify things or replicate the bodies of others on himself. Not that he doesn't try anyway.

Reinhardt’s great stature–Ana’s sharp face–Jack’s blue eyes–he attempts to mimic them (for the sake of stealth, he tells himself. For the sake of revenge) but their forms revolt against him. They never hold for long.  _How typical of them_ , he sometimes thinks. 

As time passes, though, it becomes a struggle even to maintain this sham of a body. His voice–how did it sound? His skin–what colour was it? What about his hair? His eyes? His height changes ever so slightly whenever he reforms. At one interval his limbs are broad and heavy–at another, they feel slim, narrow and bendy as pipecleaners. Wide holes start to appear in his human shell. Black smoke leaks out around the edges of his mask.

One day his body comes apart, and this time it stays that way. Trying to reform is impossible–it feels like he’s attempting to manipulate a limb he no longer has, to clench the fist of a phantom hand, to run on the strength of a severed leg. He is aware of everything. The world around him seems to gape openly with his own absence. He wants to scream. He wants to throw something over. He wants to hurt someone. He can’t do any of these things anymore.

On the rare occasions that he does manage to materialize, he does it moments at a time, not looking particularly like anyone or anything. The places where he lingers become dense with ghost stories. Everyone claims to have seen him at least once. Sometimes, he follows people home. He rests like ashes upon men’s shoulders–pieces of him are shaken out of strangers’ shoes like stones.

His awareness does not fade, but it’s not long before his memories do. They slip away so easily that he doesn’t even realize one’s missing until he reaches for it and, nauseatingly, it isn’t there. He finds he cannot recall his name (he knows that he must have one because everything else does) nor can he recall where he’s from, what he is, what he’s doing. He suspects that he’s a ghost–that he has died. That he is dead. He believes the stories that people track into his midst like mud. He crafts a looping, jumbled narrative from their tales. It changes all the time. He knows it doesn’t matter anyway.  

Now and then, a man drifts into one of his usual haunts, lingering by one of the back windows or sitting at the steps outside. He is old and scarred. His hair is shockingly white. The ghost sometimes wisps through it, leaving narrow streaks of black across his temples. There is something terribly satisfying about the sight–like leaving dark tracks in crisp new snow (the ghost wonders how he knows what that’s like.)

The white haired man sighs deeply. He closes his eyes. He kicks his legs out in front of him when he sits down, leans back so he’s resting on his elbows. There’s something loose and haphazard about his demeanor–childish. 

 _Boy scout,_  the specter thinks. He can’t say why.

Eventually the old man opens his eyes. They are an unrelenting, rebellious blue. 

They suit him. 

Carefully, slowly, as if he wants to be sure that he spares no detail, he starts to talk–not to himself, but also to no one in particular, his hard, aged gaze focused desperately on air, as if he thinks he’ll miss a glimpse at something incredible if he happens to look away. He tells countless stories, beholden to no style or chronology, letting tales of butterflies nestled in backgardens tumble into accounts of dying comrades, of bloodstained hands. Certain characters come up again and again, appearing and reappearing throughout his life in many forms, never manifesting the same way twice. Bit by bit, the specter adds points of interest to the manufactured story of his own forgotten life, until the story of the stranger and the story of himself are one and the same, the two narratives irrevocably bound.

Time drags. The man keeps coming back. He tells the same stories, but in different ways. His eyes no longer search the air. His voice rasps. His chest heaves. He talks and talks and talks–of growing up, of growing old. Of going, but never being gone.  

Gabriel rests against the earth, weighing nothing but feeling heavy just the same. 

He listens.


End file.
